Tips & Tricks in Using a Kindle for Academic Reading

With the dawn of the iPad on the scene, some people are wondering why they'd bother with a Kindle. After all, the Kindle can't play games or surf the web (ok, it can, but it's k.l.u.n.k.y.)--or at least, not yet it can't. I've posted before about Kindle accessibility and the advantages and disadvantages of a Kindle for students with disabilities. There have been several pilot programs with the Kindle for college-level reading and they have started posting their results. Examples include Reed College and Princeton University. For the sake of argument, here, let's just assume you have a Kindle, and talk about doing academic reading on one of these bad boys.

Locating Info Within the Book

I'm a very visual person. I use highlighting and margin notes in my books now in order to do one thing: remember where on the page to locate information I may want to use again. Often, I highlight quotes I may want to use in a paper, or I will write a phrase that summarizes a couple of paragraphs and include arrows or brackets. When I go back to what I was reading in order to use it, I use these visual cues to help me locate information. With a physical book, I can flip through the pages and locate what I want. Flipping through the pages is a no-can-do on the Kindle. You'll have to approach it a little differently.

While you're reading:

• Make generous use of Kindle's highlighting feature. Conventional wisdom says to highlight between 10-15% of the material in a physical book. Because you are going to use these highlights differently, shoot for 20% or so. Err on the side of highlighting more than you think you'll need.
  
• Keep the highlights relatively short. The bigger your preferred font size, the shorter you should make your highlights. The reason: when you view My Notes & Marks, where the Kindle stores your highlights, it will display between two (big font size) and size (small font size) lines of highlight. If you are trying to locate something and it's below that cutoff line, you won't see it when you're scrolling through the Notes & Marks.
• Type your notes as tags, not conventional notes. Typing on the Kindle is a bit of a, well, pain in the gluteus. The less you have to do, the easier it will be. Think of your notes as labels (tags) that will help you get back to related content. You can put multiple tags in a note, if you want. I also don't worry about capitalization or punctuation in the notes as it just slows the note entry process further. A bonus of this practice is that it encourages you to make concise (1 word!) summaries of the material you're reading, which will help your retention and comprehension. (For example, the tags I'd create for this paragraph are: tag, label, category, summary, notes, suggestions. Yours might be different from mine!)

Finding the information again:

• Search! The search feature in the Kindle is pretty darn handy. If you remember a key word or phrase (the shorter the better, by the way) that can help you locate a passage again, search for it. You can also search just your tags (notes) by typing in the search word, then moving the 5-way button to the right until it highlights 'notes'.
• View your marks. In the Menu, select "View My Notes & Marks" (one book) or in the Home screen select "My Clippings" (all your books). Because, again, I'm recommending a generous use of highlighting, there will be several pages of marks. While this is a little time-consuming to flip through, it is significantly faster than trying to remember where you saw that one thing and going through page turn after page turn in the full book. In one book I was using for my last paper, I had 72 pages of notes and marks. However, I was always able to find what I was looking for...which is kinda the point, right?
  

Citations

There's just not a lot of agreeement out there on how to cite Kindle books. The lack of real page numbers makes specific references just a bit wonky. However, the folks at the APA were kind enough to actually address citing the Kindle. For other style formats (MLA, Chicago, etc.), the consensus seems to be to consider it an online/electronic, unpaginated source. Remember, cite the version you read. If you read the Kindle, cite it. If you read the physical book, cite that. If you read it on Google Books, cite that.

Those Darn PDFs

One of the best - and worst - features of the Kindle is its ability to read PDFs. Yes, you can read PDFs natively on the Kindle with no conversion process by either sending them through Amazon's service (cheap) or connecting your Kindle to your computer with the USB cord and dragging the PDFs to the Documents folder on your Kindle (free). However, you can't annotate, change sizes, have the Kindle read it aloud, or any of the other features that make the Kindle such a good reader. I'm going to let you in on a secret that will make this easier... shhh, lean in a little closer....

Go download Calibre.

Free. Open source. End of problem. Wish I'd discovered this three terms ago when I first got my Kindle.